What We Learned When Yankees Sluggers Crushed the Giants Again originally appeared in NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO – In the offseason, the Giants tried to add players who could turn the game around with one swing. From them most notable additionJorge Soler spent Saturday afternoon working on his swing mechanics and was left out of the starting lineup due to a prolonged slump.
On the other side, the New York Yankees came to town with a power-packed lineup, and it carried them to a 7-3 victory on Saturday at Oracle Park. Aaron Judge scored early and Giancarlo Stanton scored late, leaving the Giants below .500 overall and 2-3 in their toughest home of the season. They will send Blake Snell to the mound on Sunday in hopes of salvaging the final game of this series.
The start of Saturday’s game was simply a continuation of Friday’s game. After hitting two home runs in his first career game at Oracle Park, Judge hit one of the longest bombs in park history in his first at-bat against Logan Webb, one of the Giants who tried to draft him two years ago.
The Yankees scored four times in the first three innings and put Webb on the ropes, but he plugged the leaks and stuck around long enough for the lineup to retreat. Casey Schmitt drove in two runs with a home run and Brett Wisely added an RBI single in the fifth.
The Giants tied for second in the seventh but were unable to score. Ryan Walker was one strike away from striking out the side on 10 pitches in the top of the eighth, but Judge reached on an infield single and from there the wheels fell off. Alex Verdugo’s triple brought home a run and a two-run blast from Stanton — another former Giants offseason target — made it a four-run game.
Mister Durability
It has already become a kind of habit. There are nights when Webb gets shaky early, and then Bob Melvin looks up in the seventh and his ace is somehow still out there. That was the case on Saturday, when Webb gave up four early runs but held a season-high 108 pitches. He pitched seventh for the seventh time in 13 starts and returned to the top of the MLB innings leaderboard.
The biggest exit came in the fifth and was against Judge. The Giants intentionally walked him in his second at-bat and Webb made it 2-0 with a runner on third. But this time he was allowed to keep pitching to the hottest hitter in the game and threw a 90 mph fastball to end the inning.
Putting on a show
What would Judge do for an encore? It didn’t take long to find out. With a runner on first, he killed off a Webb changeup and nearly cleared the stands in left field. The home run traveled about 464 feet and was hit at 115.7 mph, making it one of the loudest non-Bonds blasts in Oracle Park history.
Since pitch tracking began in 2008, Judge is just the second player to hit an Oracle home run that hit over 460 feet and over 115 mph from the start. The other came from Kennys Vargas, a curiosity that surprised this researcher as much as it is surprising you now. Vargas, then with the Minnesota Twins, drove Jeff Samardzija 471 feet to right center in 2017, but that was during a day game in more hitter-friendly conditions.
Judge’s home run was the seventh at Oracle Park in the pitch tracking era (since 2008) from at least 460 feet. It was the most hit ball here since Joc Pederson’s single last April.
Casey Crush
From the skill of the bat, you wouldn’t expect Schmitt’s home run to be his first of the year, but it was actually his first in the big leagues since he hit two against the Los Angeles Dodgers during the final game of the 2023 season. on a sinker from starter Cody Poteet and hit it beyond doubt, cutting the deficit in half and bringing some life back to a stadium that threatened to turn into Yankee Stadium.
Schmitt has struggled at the plate this season, but there’s no doubt he’s a great league player defensively, and some members of San Francisco’s staff were upset to see him sent off last month when the front office decided to take a look. in Marco Luciano briefly.
Opening Day starter Nick Ahmed began a rehab assignment at Triple-A Sacramento on Saturday and is expected to return soon. Ahmed and Brett Wisely appear to be the ones to handle shortstop, but Schmitt certainly made a statement on Saturday.
